Free Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont Page B

clutching her arm and crying.
    Jack went over to her, asking, “What was it?” The receptionist teetered in with a box of first aid. “What did you
do
?”
    The woman just cried. “It doesn’t matter, Jack,” Stanley said. He had one arm around the woman’s shoulders.
    It didn’t matter either when Jack said that he’d realized the problem, that it was with block #3, the bit that had not blown all away. It didn’t matter when he said he was sure that explosion was the last one, that all the others had gone off and that it was safe now for everyone to come back. None of that mattered, except to him.
    —
    The gallery was far west, near the river, but Deb was a whole avenue away when the first show cards began dotting the street like bread crumbs. She took one, catching the corner with her nail, and walked with it, big block letters,
BAYT,
bobbing in view. In smaller print, the Hebrew and the Arabic, and below those the English:
House.
    A police car pulled past her, no siren but lights revolving red and blue, which looked less threatening, candy colored, in the still-daylight.
    The police stopped just before a small crowd. There was an ambulance too, its rear doors swung open and an old woman sitting in back.
    Stanley was near the entrance, talking to an officer. He gesticulated, his hands cupping a small, round space and springing outward, fingers wide.
    Through the lobby and its people, some she knew who called to her. The doors were propped open, and she smelled smoke faintly, the beginning or tail end of it. One of Stanley’s assistants put a hand out to stop her. “I’m married to the artist,” she said, and the girl let her pass, but Deb had heard herself too, the strange claim she had on this other person that let her go places, that demanded she did. It had brought her into a room marked off with caution tape, and there was Jack, his arms wrapped around himself like a boy in a fit, the position so at odds with the size of him, the large man he was. “Larger than life,” he used to say, collapsing on top of her, pinning her to the bed.
    “They won’t listen.” He rubbed his face.
    She thought she would reach out, touch his shoulder, but didn’t. And then he moved, out of reach, to the caution tape, which he took a tall step over. “Jack.”
    He touched the wall with just his fingers, then with the whole of his hand. Deb watched him walk up and down, crouching, reaching, now running his palm along the surface, as though looking for a wire to trip. Then inside the house, and he was only feeling things, and she imagined ducking under the tape and stepping through the large hole on the side to follow him.
    Thinking it, she found she had. In the room now, she bent down and picked up one of the books he’d made, leather bound, the pages creamy and blank. She thought it would make a good journal for Kay, cleaned up.
    Jack was sitting in a chair he’d built on a carpet he’d hired someone to weave. There was a second chair, on its side, and Deb thought she should turn it right and sit with him, take his hand. But on the floor, too, was a toy, the Tigger with the missing eye that she recognized as Simon’s, something she thought they’d lost or thrown away. The leg was torn off and she didn’t know where he’d found it.
    She stood and turned slowly toward the door.
    “Deb?”
    She didn’t like the bits of glass under her shoes or the air she was breathing. She could not fix the Tigger any more than she could fix anything else, and wasn’t sure anymore that she wanted to.

What Deb wanted was to go home to her kids, but the apartment was dark when she got there, except for a green light, minute and glowing on the living room floor, the Xbox Simon always left on. She dialed his cell.
    “Hello” was how Simon always answered her, soberly, never betraying that he knew who was calling. It was something she’d always meant to ask him about, why never “Hi, Mom,” why not even “Hey,” like she heard